CBR18 Bingo: Friends – Childhood friends formed bands together, many of whom had epic friend breakups after they got famous.
Everyone thought we were fighters. I couldn’t care less about fighting. I want to fight off women, not men.
― Lizzy Goodman, Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011That Yeah Yeah Yeahs EP was really hard to find and should have been hard to find because it sounded like crap. Nick once told me that it was on a cassette and he put his jeans in the laundry, so the tape went through the laundry, and that’s what they mastered it from. I was like, “You know what, dude? I believe you. It sounds like it was recorded in a Dumpster.”
― Lizzy Goodman, Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011Soundgarden had broken up. Oasis had not delivered on their potential. Blur weren’t even sounding Britpop anymore, they were sounding like Pavement. There was always going to be Dave Matthews Band. You can’t even criticize them, they’re just there. It’d be like criticizing pigeons. You can’t get rid of them. You just hope they don’t shit on you. But the bottom line is there was money and we needed new rock stars.
― Lizzy Goodman, Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011
This book feels like a very long feature article in Rolling Stone or The Cut.
Via interviews, the author Lizzy Goodman paints the picture of what the rock music scene was like in New York City in the late nineties and early 2000s. The book focuses mostly on the band The Strokes. The Strokes were the first band to blow up worldwide and usher in the early 2000’s era of New York City rock.
Goodman meticulously reconstructs the state of the music industry at the advent of digitization and the rise of the dot com era. She interviews musicians, band managers, music and culture journalists, and record label founders to share their memories of how the early 2000’s scene came to be in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and the effects it had on music for the next decade. By contrasting the grunge and bubblegum pop eras of the nineties, and 9/11 and the subsequent war in the middle east, Goodman is able to show how bands such as The Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, and The White Stripes filled the need for the danceable, free, and unrestricted rock club scene that was absent in New York City during the nineties.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a book like this. It opens with a ten-page-long ‘Cast of Characters’, which includes everyone in the above-mentioned categories, plus friends of the band and other artists and musicians in the scene at the same time. It was hard to follow at first, as most of the names were new to me. Anyone who was not Karen O, Julian Casablancas, or Moby, I had to look up.
At six hundred and forty pages, this is the longest non-fiction book I’ve ever read. Composed entirely of first-person interviews made it feel longer. At the thirty percent mark, it felt like I’d been reading it forever.
One thing that this book does really well is that it doesn’t sugarcoat the problems of the bands. Drugs are described as both romantic and exciting, as well as depressing, and, at times, really disgusting (to me at least). Many of the interviewees admit they don’t remember large swaths of their most successful and memorable performances because they were so messed up. Many of them lived in various levels of squalor in Brooklyn, such as nine people squatting in a loft, for years before they signed with a label.
For anyone who remembers this era as it was coming up, this is a must-read. Other than The White Stripes, The Vines, and Franz Ferdinand, most of the focus is on bands that originated in New York, as well as the early internet influencers and journalists who helped make them popular.
A few years ago, I watched a documentary of the same name. At the time, I didn’t appreciate it because so many of the band members and journalists interviewed for the film were completely new to me. You’d better believe that I am going to rewatch it again this weekend and put names to faces.
This is a perfect “grazing” book to read on a lazy afternoon or on a series of flights. I got it from the library and struggled to finish it within my twenty-one-day reading window.
CW for drug and alcohol abuse, rehab, and off-page mentions of overdosing.
